The NewStandard: A ParEcon Workplace is Possible

By Jessica Azulay

[Excerpted from the book Real Utopia (AK Press, June 2008)]

A parecon workplace is possible. I have experienced one, and now I believe we can overcome
capitalism.

The hierarchical workplace is an insidious institution. It is a powerful mechanism through which

capitalism imposes and normalizes some of its most vicious values: It thrives on competition. It
encourages authoritarianism and subservience. It rewards workers for their race, gender,
education, output, age, conformity, and their ability to "work the system." It is dangerous for
individual empowerment and democracy, yet it is embraced even by most social-change
organizations. It must be subverted.

The theory of Participatory Economics provides a framework for creating a new kind of workplace
in present-day market economies. It shows us how to organize our work around a different set of
values: equity, solidarity, democracy, and diversity.

Unlike some facets of the parecon vision, which may seem lofty and futuristic, the workplace
model can to a great extent be immediately implemented. I say this with confidence because I
have done it.

For four years, I, along with several co-workers, labored in a parecon-based workplace to
produce a daily, online news publication called The NewStandard. TNS, as we called it, was 100
percent reader funded and not-for-profit. It upheld the highest ethical standards in the news
industry and focused on the perspectives of people most affected by current events and
government and corporate policy.

Our particular project was a less-than-ideal laboratory for parecon. At its peak, when there were
six of us, we worked from four different locations, which made communication challenging. We
worked grueling hours to meet daily publishing deadlines, leaving little time and energy for other
aspects of our organization. And the funding pressures of the news and alternative-media
industries kept our publication on the financial brink.

Yet we found even this to be a rich environment in which to stave off hierarchy. Using the parecon
fundamentals---balanced job complexes, participatory decision-making, and payment for effort
and sacrifice---we were able to experiment, invent, and reinvent until we found ways of operating
that were increasingly efficient and fair.

The workplace structure we created for ourselves was unlike any other parecon-based
organization we have ever heard of. Parecon's emphasis on diversity, self-management and
solidarity allowed each of us to participate in the development of our organization and to help it
work for each and all of us. So here is how this exciting economic vision was put into practice by
Megan Tady, Shreema Mehta, Catherine Komp, Brian Dominick, Brendan Coyne, Michelle Chen,
Simone Baribeau and myself.

Jill of All Trades

There are many ways to implement balanced job complexes. Some groups have rotated tasks,
giving everyone a turn at each to-do. I know of at least one organization that tried to assign an
empowerment ranking to each chore. At TNS, we didn't have the time to get very scientific about
it and we also needed each staffer to work on things she was good at.

We divided our work into four categories: managerial, content, administrative, and something we
called "conmin." Had we all been working in the same physical space, there would have been a
janitorial category, but since we each worked from home, the messiness of our respective
workplaces was not a collective concern.

The managerial category covered work related to decision-making. It included attending collective
meetings, participating in email discussions, serving on decision-making committees, and other
forms of coordination and management that involved policy-related decision-making.

The content category included tasks associated with creating and publishing: reporting, editing,
website development, etc. Since this work became the public face of our organization and
required a high skill level, we considered it very empowering.

Administrative work included most of the behind-the-scenes tasks: bookkeeping, answering

email, providing technical support to website users, opening the snail mail, answering the phone,
cutting and pasting website text or computer code, taking meeting notes, etc.

Finally, the conmin category was something we created to encompass tasks that were less
desirable than most content work, but more empowering than most administrative work. This was
not one of our original categories, but we created it out of necessity to acknowledge that some
tasks carry empowerment with them, but are nonetheless tedious. This category included
activities like writing text for our fundraising drives, fact checking, and putting together our
member newsletter.

When we divided up the work, we tried to make sure that each staffer was assigned roughly the
same number of hours of each kind of work. It didn't always come out equal, but we tried to
address inequities by rotating tasks when possible and assigning new or temporary tasks
according to who was low on certain types of work. We also audited ourselves periodically by
keeping track of who spent how much time on what.

Some aspects of our jobs were very similar. For instance, participation in collective meetings and
email discussions were part of everyone's balanced job complex. We also took turns acting as
facilitator and note-taker at meetings.

The rest of our workdays were fairly specialized. My own balanced job complex during the last
year of publication consisted mostly of editing work (content) and an occasional writing
assignment (content). I was also the main fact-checker (conmin), the article coordinator
(managerial) and the bookkeeper (administrative). And I posted content to the website most
mornings (administrative).

Brian Dominick's job complex included website development (content), copy editing (content) and
writing/editing short news bulletins (content). He also posted content to the website
(administrative), answered the mail and phones (administrative), performed website upkeep
(administrative) and provided technical support (administrative). And he coordinated our In Other
News section (managerial).

Another co-worker, Megan Tady, spent most of her time writing articles (content) as well as doing
some editing (content). She was a member of the fundraising/promotion and accountability
committees (both a mix of managerial and conmin). And she managed all member email
(administrative). Most of the other "managing reporters" like Megan had similar job complexes.
Organized Anarchy

At TNS it wasn't that no one was in charge; everyone was in charge. But we did not make
decisions in isolation, which would have lead to chaos. Instead, we developed a sophisticated
structure to facilitate quick group decisions, self-management and accountability. This was based
on a formal policy we called the Participatory Decision-Making Process.

The goal of the decision-making process was to engage all participants in order to account for
diverse views and opinions and arrive at the most widely agreeable or acceptable outcomes. The
greater the impact a decision would have on the organization, the more agreement it needed.

We arrived at decisions using a variety of democratic methods, including consensus and voting.
When a decision had a large impact on our organization, we required consensus, which to us
meant that everyone actively accepted the decision. We also limited the circumstances in which
members could block consensus to those in which a member felt a decision constituted a radical
departure from the mission or core values of the organization or the decision would pose a moral
dilemma unacceptable to the blocker.

When impact on the organization was smaller and removed from the realm of morality and core
values, we employed a voting method. Sometimes we used simple majority (four out of six votes,
for instance), and sometimes we required a super majority (five out of six votes).

Regardless of which method was used, a formal discussion process always preceded a decision
so that staffers could weigh in, ask questions, modify proposals, or express dissent. Dissent was
always recorded in our meeting notes, even when dissenters eventually accepted an outcome.

To better comply with the principles of parecon, we also sometimes used other, more-unorthodox
methods, in conjunction with consensus or voting.

One such method was called "proportional input." We used this to account for the disparate
impact a decision might have on one or more staff members. When using a voting method, like
simple or super majority, individual staffers were assigned additional votes based on how much
the decision would impact them.

When using proportional input with consensus, a person who stood to be disproportionately
affected by a decision could block consensus, even if the decision posed no departure from the
organizational mission and presented no moral dilemma.

Another unorthodox method we used was called "proportional outcome." This method was
designed to increase the diversity of our decision-making outcomes. For instance, we used
proportional outcome to decide which of several possible new features to implement on our
website. We each ranked the possibilities from favorite to least favorite, added up the scores
assigned to each item and then used the items with the top three scores.

Proportional-output voting was invaluable in cases where we were seeking the "best" solutions,
rather than trying to determine right and wrong ways of moving forward. We often used this
method when deciding how much to buy or how much to spend on something. Instead of trying to
gain majority support for a specific number, we would each propose a number, average the
proposals and use that average as our final decision.

This Participatory Decision-Making Process probably sounds complicated, but over time it
became pretty intuitive. For most day-to-day decisions we reached unanimity very easily, even
when a voting procedure could have been used. Most of us found it easy to reach compromises
and stay relatively unattached to our own preferences because no one wanted to sit in meetings
longer than necessary. Staffers had to agree to the decision-making process before joining, and
experienced staffers helped newer collective members navigate the process until they were
comfortable with it.

Speaking of meetings, we did have a lot of them. We held short morning meetings (about 20
minutes) most weekdays to decide which stories TNS would pursue. These meetings took place
at the same time every morning and were conducted over a free conference-calling system.
Other day-to-day decisions were made over email, instant message, or an occasional emergency
conference call.

Decisions that could not be made with these methods or that needed longer discussion were
saved for our weekly meetings, which were also held by conference call. These lasted about one
to two hours. Facilitation for these meetings rotated among all staff members. The facilitator was
also in charge of putting an agenda together and sending it out to all collective members ahead of
time. Note taking for these meetings also rotated.

We also held board meetings a few times a year. For these, everyone traveled to one location for
a "retreat," which involved a series of meetings over two or three days. Whenever possible, we
saved major organizational decisions for these face-to-face discussions. The task of creating the
agenda for these retreats rotated among staff as well.

Before you think the TNS workplace was utopian, let me assure you that we did have problems.
Sometimes people habitually missed their deadlines. Sometimes staffers violated our policies.
Sometimes they abused power. Eventually, we realized that we needed a way to hold each other
accountable for such transgressions.

The main goals of our accountability process, developed over several months, were (1) to provide
a fair and quick way to address problematic behavior, (2) to focus on restitution instead of
punishment, (3) to provide staff members with support or resources they needed to change their
behavior, (4) to allow transgressing staff members to own up to their mistakes and self-manage
their remedies.

Any staff member could ask for an accountability meeting about another staffer. At the meeting,
the problematic behavior would be described in detail and the negative impacts on individuals or
the organization would be listed. Staffers would then decide if the violation was mild, medium or
severe. Severity of violations would determine which remedies staffers would have at their
disposal.

For mild violations, staffers could ask the violator to write an "owning up letter" to the rest of the
collective in which she would describe her own problematic behavior and apologize for it. For
medium violations, there were several options, including asking the transgressor to come up with
her own plan for restitution, prescribing a course of restitution (like extra work to make up for the
extra work she caused someone else), corrective instruction (like re-reading the journalist
handbook or read a tutorial about the specific area she messed up with).

For situations in which decision-making power or other forms of empowerment were abused, the
collective might temporarily shift the transgressor's balanced job complex to include more rote
work and less content or management work.

For the most severe violations, the collective could decide to take away decision-making power
specific to the offense. The collective could also decide to downgrade a staffer's status from full
collective member back to trial collective member. This was a severe step that would strip the
transgressor of blocking power for six months at the end of which all other collective members
would have to reach consensus to restore full membership.

Payment for Effort and Sacrifice

All full-time staff members at The NewStandard were paid the same salary, regardless of
seniority. Though we started off having receive pay in the form of promised "sweat equity," by the
end, we were paying $21,600 per year, a living wage in most of the cities from which we worked.
We also provided health insurance and eleven days paid vacation.

Our sick-day policy was a little less traditional. We wanted to recognize that some people get sick
more often or have more family emergencies than others through no fault of their own. So we
gave each collective member three personal days that they could use in the event of sickness or
personal emergency. And then we created a collective "pot" in which we put four days for each
staffer. (For instance, when there were six of us, there were 24 days in the pot at the beginning of
each year.) Anyone could use days in the pot if they ran out of personal days. But if the pot had
ever run out of days (which it never did), anyone who used more than four from the pot, might
have to start paying days back. This just meant that some of the days they took would revert from
paid to unpaid days.

The result of this policy was that people had a disincentive to take more days than they needed
because they knew that leaving days in the pot would help other collective members. Staffers
also knew that if they took more than seven days, they might have to pay some of them back if
the pot ran out. This policy helped foster solidarity among the staff, as well as accommodate a
diversity of needs.

Aside from employing a full-time staff, TNS also paid several dozen freelance journalists over the
years. We knew that coming up with a system for paying reporters based on their effort and
sacrifice would be difficult, but we tried anyway. I think we got pretty close.

We made a list of the different kinds of work entailed in writing news articles and then we
assigned a dollar value to each. For instance, conducting a full interview with a source was worth
$20, while reading a document (like a court transcript or a scientific study) was valued at $10.
Calling a source for comment chalked up $5. There was a base fee for all articles on top of which
fees for these specific types of work were added.

We set up an online system so that after publication of an article, a journalist could log on through
our website and fill out an invoice. She would list all the interviews conducted, calls for comment
made, documents read, etc. She could also note any extra effort that went into the article. For
instance, sometimes journalists had to read documents that were hundreds of pages long or
sometimes sources were particularly difficult to interview. When she was done, her editor would
review the invoice and adjust amounts accordingly. The editor could also add bonuses for clean
copy (which saved others labor time), a quick turnaround (which implied sacrifice) or other extra
efforts.

The Capitalist Intersection

Many people think that our nonprofit, reader-driven funding model killed TNS. I think it would be
more accurate to say that capitalism killed TNS. Our funding strategy, which was to ask readers
to donate a small amount each month, proved successful in many ways. Per reader, we raised an
extraordinary amount of money, much more than we could have if we had tried selling our
readers' eyeballs to advertisers.
Our main funding problem was that we never gained enough readers. I believe that is because
our news-making model incorporated gobs of hard work and ethics, and we were competing in a
greed-driven marketplace that generally rewards exactly the opposite.

Aside from funding, the toughest challenge our collective faced was hiring. The U.S. education
system and capitalist economy do not prepare people for working in a parecon workplace. We
needed people who were skilled journalists, but willing to work for low pay while putting in the
extra effort our high standards required. We also needed people who were ready and able to take
on the challenges involved in managing a struggling nonprofit organization, but who were willing
to share that power collectively.

We found that many skilled journalists did not always have the desire to manage an organization
or enthusiasm for collective decision-making. And people with enthusiasm for our workplace
values often lacked the reporting or editing skills we required. On top of that, almost everyone
qualified for the job could find better pay elsewhere.

For those of us who did end up working at TNS, it was life-changing. Those who had never even
heard of parecon before joining our collective quickly adapted to it and became devotees. The
very things that made hiring hard, made working on TNS rewarding. Each of us was able to learn
and grow in many different directions at once and develop diverse aspects of our professional
lives. Although our adventure did not last forever, the four-year experience that we created for
ourselves and the example that we provided to those who came into contact with us still
reverberates.

We discovered the parecon workplace to be an inspirational institution. I believe it could be a

powerful mechanism through which a movement for radical economic change could facilitate and
normalize its most vital values: equity, solidarity, self-management and diversity. It encourages
individual empowerment and democracy, yet it is rejected by most social-change institutions.
They see it not as a threat to capitalism, but as a threat to their internal status quo. But, if we
must become now what we wish to see in a better society, resistance to true workplace equity
and democracy must give way, and nonhierarchical workplaces must be implemented.

Here is the second piece as promised...

Greenspan: The Torments of Contrition

By Frederic F. Clairmont

I was stunned like many on hearing the news on the BBC at 22:00hrs on the 23 October that
Greenspan had confessed in his lugubrious mea culpa to Congress that he was ‘shocked in
disbelief' by the sheer velocity and propagation of the demolition of the edifice of finance
capitalism. His confession of contrition, whose transcript I have now read in its entirety, was not
the act of a desperate shell-shocked shriveled creature that had seen the ravages wrought by his
policies at the Federal Reserve, i.e. the central bank of the U S caste oligarchy. In those decades
of public office, shuttling from Wall Street to Washington D C. as a transplant of Goldman Sachs,
(the world's largest investment bank), he had deployed his exalted tenure for the collective
enrichment of his discredited caste of financial cronies. Not to be excluded was his massively
successful individual accumulation.

It was not fortuitous that these spasms of contrition transpired at a moment when the worlds'
stock markets, from New York to Tokyo, recorded triple digit declines. The rout of equity and
commodity markets remains unstoppable. The despicable hedge funds in a state of disarray are
selling (deleveraging is the ugly buzz word) every piece of office furniture they can grab to meet
the payments of their lenders. Their paradisiacal days of short-selling and the carry-on trade and
other unbridled speculative plunder of the big casino money machine have run into the mud.
Even Federal backed government mortgages, hawked by blue-chip corporations, have joined the
tumble; no banks, insurance companies, mutual and pension funds are immune from ruin; most
of the quasi colonial so-called emergent markets are poised to default on their rocketing levels of
debt; the scrambling of every rickety capitalist government to save its skin is on the top of the
agenda. In this cesspool of panic and collapse there is no haven for the bourgeois order to seek
cover. Non-stop capital infusions (i.e. taxpayers money) by the manipulators of finance capital to
the tune of trillions of dollars are impotent to resuscitate the semblance of a bygone era of
normality. The dogmas and rotting institutional underpinnings of the bourgeois order that
bamboozled many into believing that their creations were things of fixity and permanence have
been irreversibly flung into the abyss of a deep black slump. What we are seeing in effect is the
spectacle of the kingdom of swindledom run amuck.

Greenspan was the impresario of an El Dorado of incomparable pickings that would have made
even Warren Hastings and the East India Company, and their subsequent emulators in occupied
India, (that escalated into the mass genocide in the subsequent century) appear like a bunch of
miserable petty pickpockets. A theme that I elaborated in my researches on The Rise and Fall
Economic Liberalism: The Making of the Economic Gulag.

His mea culpa is an act of immense historical significance, yet in perspective it is nothing but a
morsel of trivial apologetics. The criminal tale of his abject confessions of the system's delirium
tremens told us nothing that we had not known before. What was startling, however, was that this
death rattle came from a stricken soul that could no longer coexist with his burden of guilt. What
we have witnessed is the unfolding of the personal tragedy of a sordidly bankrupt and corrupt
human being who sees the approaching finality of finance capitalism and its failures as the
system meandered from upheaval to upheaval during his reign.

His confessions came at that propitious moment when the world stock markets without exception
were wallowing in the excrement of the most ignoble economic collapse that our planet has ever
seen, easily surpassing in its horrors and intensity that of 1929. Trillions of dollars were scrubbed
from the world's panic stricken bourses in days and hours - a movement that shows no signs of
abating . The revulsion that millions experienced on seeing this debacle on their television
screens and reading the agonizing media headlines also demonstrated to the world that the
savings and assets of tens of millions of working peoples - the creators of wealth - had been
blatantly swindled at the throw of a gambler's toss.

Greenspan was the criminal prime mover that abetted the lethal rise and rise of derivative
markets presently topping $155 trillion dollars, almost four times the size of our planet's wealth.
The criminality of his policies was matched by his intellectual impoverishment perceived in his
tortured lingo that " the whole intellectual edifice collapsed in the summer of last year [ August
2007] because the data inputted (sic)into the risk management models generally covered only the
past two decades, a period of euphoria.".

Stripped of its jargon this meant that sub-prime loans were chopped, diced and packaged into
toxic mortgage-backed securities and other derivatives that were marketed at prodigious profits
the world over. The trough was brimming. It was the grand extravaganza of capitalist
internationalism. This gimcrack house of cards ignominiously crumbled as US borrowers
defaulted on mortgage payments in droves, and as house prices slumped. Never mind that his
utterance is ambiguous - markets thrive on ambiguity and double talk. Of which Greenspan is an
unrivaled practitioner.

Note the conjuror's hand of this financial swindler; it is deemed an intellectual edifice. We are
sedulously invited to believe that we are not dealing with the pitiless world of class power and
exploitation. What transpired in the markets was all an immense error of the intellect. Capitalism's
destructive convulsion generated by the juggernaut of capital itself is thus reduced to a crisis of
the intellect. The swindlers that hawked these death-dealing derivatives do not really exist. It is a
fantasy. All of this was nothing more than an intellectual shortfall. This brings us to the pivotal
issue: capitalism is not an exploitative engine; there is nothing within it that is engineered to
exploit any one. It transcends social classes. Competitive markets and the law of supply and
demand ensure that there are neither winners or losers. Markets are thus the grand equalizers.
Capitalism and the market forces through which it functions thus becomes the supreme
expression of democratic choice ; its raison d'etre is rooted in the infallible concatenation of social
change. All that matters, as Greenspan teaches, is that we were misguided by the wrong models..
In sum, by the powers of intellect that were fleetingly irrational.

Listen again to this bit of sanctimonious babbling that reveals his propensity for the soothing
nostrum of models. " I found a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning
structure that defines how the world works. That's precisely the reason I was shocked...I still do
not fully understand why it happened, and obviously to the extent that I figure where it happened
and why, I will change my views." It would not be a waste of our time to remind him that his
dogmas , like his persona, have already been torn to shreds. In much the same manner as the
shattered fortunes of his political master in the White House he served so obsequiously.

No doubt by the choice of the appropriate model he means the selection of the sharpest
butcher's knife. To be sure, Greenspan's cold blooded policies were deliberately designed to
enrich a specific parasitical class, knowing full well that prices do not soar infinitely into the
celestial spheres.; ultimately their descent is precipitous. The boom is metamorphosed into a
bubble and the bubble implodes into a bust. The rich and the mega rich would not be affected by
what he designates as the Tsunami.

The world's biggest bubble had burst in August 2007. And its horrendous reverberations on the
lives of millions who had been bulldozed out of their homes - the American Dream - were merely
one facet of capital's self-inflicted agony. His maudlin prattle unmasks, however, the extent of his
impotence and indubitably, I daresay, the magnitude of the criminality of international capitalism in
its period of irreversible putrescence. This is what Saramago, the combative Nobel prize laureate,
no doubt means when he trenchantly said that the crash , and the ensuing economic and social
holocaust that trailed in its wake, is one of the greatest crimes against humanity ever recorded.

It is well to let Greenspan, now wriggling in his state of apoplexy, babble on: "Those of us who
have who looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity - myself
especially - are now a state of shocked disbelief". Why should he be shocked? He has lost
nothing but his wretched illusions. His fortunes are unimpaired. His officially estimated net worth
is $15 billion , and presumably that does not include his treasure ensconced in Caribbean tax
havens and of which he is one of its most ferocious protagonists. Those who are traumatized to
the marrow are the workers in Pittsburg and Detroit and Cleveland and the nation's industrial
heartland now transmogrified into a toxic wasteland. On this misery is superimposed the
outsourcing of millions of jobs.

During his stewardship the soaring inequalities that his caste and his policies spawned had
surpassed those of the Gilded Age [1890-1914], and the abysmally corrupt regimes of Harding,
Coolidge and Hoover in the twenties. As for his bellicose support for the $3 trillion colonial war in
Mesopotamia comment is superfluous. As the once sanctified apparatchik of world money and
credit markets he framed monetary and fiscal policy that enriched the cronies of his irredeemably
debased caste oligarchy. He did what his class interests dictated he should have done. In this
respect, his ideology and his policies were flawlessly meshed.

Greenspan enshrined the reality and aspirational drives of the ruling caste oligarchy in The
Fortune 500. He remains its prime exemplar. Capital must never be understood as an impersonal
force; it is embedded in the complex workings of accumulation. Here was the divinity worshipped
by the profiteers of the world's money engines in every niche and cranny of big-moneyed finance
the world over for decades; the paltriest of his pronouncements were sifted and scrutinized , as in
the mutterings of the Delphic Oracle, for the rich offerings they were assumed to possess.

He incarnated the triumphalism of neo-liberalism,; he extolled the intoxicating magic of the

market place, the glories of privatization, the Washington consensus , the conquests and ruthless
pillage of foreign markets masquerading under the innocuous alibi of globalization whose ultimate
quest, as Greenspan sees it, is the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. The American economy
that he presided was dependent however on the world's savings. By its very nature this jerry-built
structure proved ephemeral, jacked up by borrowed money and borrowed time.

The driving force of imperialism and the laws of its causality found no home in his desiccated
ideological apparatus. He was at once a master of corporate capitalism that had amassed his
fortune in Goldman Sachs subsequently catapulting his carcass to the highest reaches of the
corporate Gulag's state apparatus where his thrust for personal enrichment sustained its
remorseless strides. In his view, the goals of the public and private sectors could not be grasped
as autonomous entities; they were interpenetrative and his ideological praxis confirmed it.

I shall say no more at this juncture but let me add , in conclusion, that we must be grateful for the
trivia that he has bequeathed us. A sewer needs no advertisement and the personal class
trajectory of his advance lucidly exemplifies this truth. His tearful contrition delivered in that
Sanctum Sanctorum of capital's entrenched power has served to smash the foundations of the
empire's ruling class economics, preached by such servile sycophants as Samuelson and his
tribe of neo-liberals. His mumblings in the sanctuary of the caste oligarchy have undermined the
institutional foundations of corporate capitalism and its works. His mea culpa was not part of this
design. Yet irrespective of the forces that impelled him to perform his act of contrition we must
render him our thanks infinite.

Frederic F. Clairmont